Situated atop condominium buildings, 'top floor units' (TFU) offer unparalleled views and privacy, courtesy of accessible roofs. This paper empirically examines this status symbol and finds that: (1) TFUs interact with the macroeconomy differently from ordinary units, (2) when considering the...

Based on Chinese city-level data from 1999 to 2012 and controlling for geological, environmental, and social diversity, this study suggests that credit plays a significant role in driving up house prices after the Great Recession, whereas property prices only influence bank lending before 2008....

This paper revisits the relationships among macroeconomic variables and asset returns. Based on recent developments in econometrics, we categorize competing models of asset returns into different "Equivalence Predictive Power Classes" (EPPC). During the pre-crisis period (1975-2005), some models...

This paper studies how the presence of sponsor and external management affect leverage and debt maturity decisions in three major Asian-Pacific REIT markets: Australia, Japan and Singapore. Our empirical results indicate that sponsored REITs opt for higher levels of leverage and loans with...

We present cross-country evidence that a country's macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country's historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of...

This paper aims to achieve two objectives. First, we demonstrate that with respect to business cycle frequency (Burns and Mitchell, 1946), there was a general decrease in the association between macroeconomic variables (MV) and housing market variables (HMV) following the global financial crisis...

We add arbitraging middlemen - investors who attempt to profit from buying low and selling high - to a canonical housing market search model. Flipping tends to take place in sluggish and tight, but not in moderate, markets. To follow is the possibility of multiple equilibria. In one equilibrium,...